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God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.
-John Ruskin
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Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.
-John Ruskin
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Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.
-John Ruskin
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Ability
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No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.
-John Ruskin
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The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.
-John Ruskin
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When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
-John Ruskin
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Anger
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The anger of a person who is strong, can always bide its time.
-John Ruskin
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Appearance
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No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.
-John Ruskin
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Architecture
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An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
-John Ruskin
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We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!
-John Ruskin
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No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
-John Ruskin
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No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
-John Ruskin
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When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
-John Ruskin
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Art
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Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people
From: An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at the Kensington Museum, January, 1858.
-John Ruskin, The Two Paths
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In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.
-John Ruskin
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What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
-John Ruskin
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I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
-John Ruskin
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No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
-John Ruskin
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Authors & Writing
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Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
-John Ruskin
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It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
-John Ruskin
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Beauty
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Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.
-John Ruskin
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Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.
-John Ruskin
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Business
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Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.
-John Ruskin
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Change
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One of the prevailing sources of misery and crime is in the generally accepted assumption, that because things have been wrong a long time, it is impossible they will ever be right.
-John Ruskin
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They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.
-John Ruskin
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Books by and about John Ruskin